Cat A Little Game About Little Heroes

About Cat

Cat: A Little Game About Little Heroes is a small role-playing ruleset by John Wick. This wiki page provides a brief overview of the rules and notes about how to adapt the game to the Zelda RPG setting. While I aim to make this page complete enough to allow people to play, I encourage anybody who is interested to buy the full rulebook, if only to reward the author. The PDF version (which is the only version available anyway as of this writing) is only $5.

Creating a Character

Traits

A Cat character starts with 6 traits of varying strength:

• 1 Best trait, worth 5 dice
• 3 Strong traits, worth 4 dice
• 2 Good traits, worth 3 dice

Choose which traits are Best, Strong, and Good for your cat amongst the following:

• Claws: Fighting and climbing
• Coat: Physical protection, persuasiveness
• Face: Senses
• Fangs: Fighting and carrying
• Legs: Movement
• Tail: Magic

Reputation

Reputations are things a particular cat is known for being good at, like "Rat Catcher" or "High Jumper". Each cat starts with 7 reputation points which can be assigned to whatever reasonable reputations you can come up with. At the start, 3 is the maximum number of points a single reputation can have.

Rules

Taking Risks

Anytime you want to perform an action where the outcome is uncertain, figure out which of your traits best applies to the action and roll the amount of 6-sided dice for that trait -- for example, if you use a Strong trait, /roll 4d6. Then count how many of the rolls came up as even numbers (2, 4, or 6). To succeed at an easy task requires at least 1 even, medium requires 2 evens, hard requires 3 evens. If you fail, the scene-runner gets to decide what happens.

Advantage Bonus

You can add more dice to your rolls by noting any advantages you might have. For example, if you need to sneak past something, you can claim an advantage if the area you're sneaking through is dark or matches the color of your coat, adding 1 dice to your roll.

Reputation Bonus

If you have a reputation that applies to your action, you may add a number of dice equal to that reputation's rank to your roll.

Style

If you get more evens than you need to succeed at an action, the extra evens count as style points. You can save style points and use them later to count as automatic evens on a future action. You must say before rolling the dice how many style points you are spending, though, and any surplus caused by using style points does not get saved over again. For example, suppose you are attempting an action that requires 3 evens, and you say beforehand that you are using 2 style points on the action. Your roll gives 2 evens. Since you spent 2 style points, this is boosted to a total of 4, meaning you succeed at the action. Since your actual roll had only 2 evens, however, you do not gain any new style points.

You can also use style as an excuse to do awesome stuff in your poses. For example, suppose you need to jump to safety past an unfriendly dog, the scene-runner said you need 2 evens for this attempt, and you roll 4 events. If you like, you can say you not only made it, you springboard off the dumb pooch's head in the process! For this purpose, it doesn't matter whether you spent style points or not to get above the success threshold; anytime you get more evens than you needed, feel free to have fun with it.

Scars

If you fail a risk that has dangerous consequences, look at your dice and find the lowest odd number (1, 3, or 5) amongst them. You take that many scars, which are applied to your traits. You can put scars on whichever trait or traits makes sense in the IC situation, but the scene-runner gets final say.

For every 3 scars on a trait, it drops 1 rank -- Best becomes Strong, Strong becomes Good. Good can go down to Hurt, which rolls 2 dice, and Hurt can go down to Crippled, which cannot be used in rolls.

At the start of each scene, if you have any scars carried over, heal 1 of them. You can also heal 1 scar for every IC week which passes (just use your best judgment about time between scenes).

Fighting

To fight something, do a roll with whatever trait, reputation, and advantages you can, and count the even results. Then have the target do the same. If the attacker gets more evens than the defender, the defender takes however many scars the attacker won by. Each character in a scene can attack once per round of poses, and defend as many times as necessary. (This is a little different from the rules in the official Cat rulebook, making teamwork more advantageous and scars less likely.) The fight is over when one side gives up or the scene-runner thinks they've taken enough scars to lose.

Nine Lives

Each cat starts with 9 lives. A life can be used to:

• Succeed at any challenge regardless of traits or difficulty (before rolling)
• Dodge any scars gained from a single round (after rolling)
• At character creation, spend 1 life to increase a trait from Good to Strong or 2 lives to increase a trait from Strong to Best (max 3 lives spent this way)

Magic

The Cat rulebook has a whole chapter on cat magic, with descriptions of various tricks a cat can pull off. I can't list them all out here without straining the bounds of fair use, so I'll just say that if you can think of something that would realistically be impossible but seems catty, you can very likely convince the scene-runner to let you do it as a cat magic trick. Also, if the scene-runner or somebody else has access to the rulebook, maybe they can suggest a cat trick from it and describe it when a good situation to use it arises. Finally, since Zelda RPG takes place in a world where magic isn't exactly unheard of anyway, you can say your cat character is able to do magic that doesn't have anything to do with being a cat per se -- fireballs and wind spells and such. It would be best to establish what those abilities are at character creation, though, and tie them to a #Reputation.

Each cat starts with 5 magic points plus 1 magic point for each rank in their Tail trait (+1 for Good, +2 for Strong, etc.). 1 magic point is used to do a trick using the cat's Tail trait, and more magic points can be burned to add extra dice to the roll at a rate of 1 magic point for 1 dice. Cats can restore magic points by sleeping. For each hour of uninterrupted sleep, they regain 1 magic point.

Death

My personal preference for death in role-playing is to ultimately let the players decide whether their character dies, and not tie it strictly to a game mechanic. Nevertheless, if you want a guideline for where death lies in this system, it's this: a cat that has four crippled traits or has used up all of their #Nine Lives dies.

Zelda RPG Notes

Strictly speaking, you do not need to play a literal cat character. Any creature that could be imagined getting along with cats and participating in adventures with them will do. Remlits are a good cat-like option if you'd like something that originated in the Zelda universe.

In the original Cat rulebook, there is a background story about cats having won a contest that takes place in the dream world every thousand years, and as a consequence they have the responsibility of protecting humans. Instead of that, on Zelda RPG, individual cats (or other critters) are awakened by the Goddesses to special responsibilities. These responsibilities can be anything from "Look after this family" to "Keep this place clear of monsters" to "Help out wherever your nose takes you each day". Cats will often band together to accomplish difficult goals, especially if it overlaps their responsibilities.

The Cat rulebook describes invisible monsters called boggins which feed on the negative emotions of humans (envy, fear, laziness, etc.) and manipulate them into wallowing in those emotions. On Zelda RPG, we'll use that basic concept, but we have a convenient source for them: malice, the dark purplish ooze that Ganondorf unleashed in Hyrule Castle Town. The vapors rising from malice spawn ghostly apparitions that humans (and Gorons, Zora, etc.) cannot see, but cats can. Killing such malice specters before they can do serious harm will constitute a large part of the cats' part in fighting the evil in Hyrule.

Malice specters aren't the only threat, though. There are plenty of monsters in the Zelda universe, and a lot of them that are only a nuisance to bigger heroes could pose an interesting challenge to our feline adventurers. A patch of deku babas has sprouted behind the schoolhouse? Better do some aggressive gardening before the kiddies get hurt. Bombchus are stealing food from the storehouse? Time for a rat-catcher. A lizalfos was spying on the Resistance and is now carrying secrets back to its master? This one's gonna take a group effort, but we can't let it get away!